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Russian Salad
(BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL.) 1 cup of carrots.
1 cup of potatoes.
1 cup of peas.
INGREDIENTS.
1 cup of beans (flageolets preferred). 6 tablespoonfuls of oil. 3 tablespoonfuls of vinegar.
1 teaspoonful of salt. ¼ a teaspoonful of pepper.
A head of lettuce.
1 cup of mayonnaise.
1 cup of shrimps. ¼ a lb. of smoked salmon.
I hard-boiled egg.
Method. Marinate the carrots and potatoes, cut in small pieces, also the peas and beans, with French dressing. Arrange on a dish in four sections, having lettuce for the foundation of each. Cover each vegetable with mayonnaise. Strew the tops of two sections with small pieces of smoked salmon; on a third section strew the sifted yolk of the egg, and on the fourth, the white of the egg, cut rather coarsely. Outline the inner side
A composed salad rather than a tossed one: four dressed vegetables laid out in sections on lettuce, masked with mayonnaise and finished with salmon and egg. The text is transcribed from a page with worn fractions, and it breaks off mid-sentence, so a little reconstruction is needed.
- Read the numeralsThe "I" before "hard-boiled egg" is the figure 1, as are the cup measures for carrots, potatoes, peas and beans. The pepper quantity was checked against the printed page and reads a quarter of a teaspoonful, against one teaspoonful of salt.
- The French dressing is already listedThe six tablespoons oil, three of vinegar, salt and pepper are not extra seasonings but the marinade the method calls for. Whisk them together and divide among the four bowls of vegetables.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green shell beans, still sold dried in French groceries and canned in some supermarkets. A cup of drained cooked cannellini or small white beans stands in without changing the character of the dish.
- Dress the potatoes warmCooked vegetables take up vinaigrette far better before they cool. Cut the boiled carrots and potatoes into small even dice, dress them while still warm, and let them sit 20 to 30 minutes; peas and beans need only a few minutes.
- The shrimps and the missing lineThe page ends at "Outline the inner side," and the cup of shrimps is never assigned. One plausible reading is that the shrimp, cooked and peeled, outline the borders between the four sections and the rim of the dish, but the truncated text does not say so.
- Smoked salmonQuarter pound of cold-smoked salmon, sliced thin and torn into small pieces. Add it at the last moment, since the mayonnaise softens it and its oil bleeds into the white dressing if it stands.
- MayonnaiseA cup of mayonnaise made the period way contains raw yolk. Use pasteurized eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, and keep the assembled dish refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly six first-course portions, or four as a lunch dish. It is meant to be looked at before it is eaten, so build it on a wide flat platter and do not toss it.
Salade russe reached American cookbooks by way of French professional kitchens, where a mixture of diced root vegetables and peas bound with mayonnaise had become standard garnish work. Popular accounts trace the dish to the Moscow restaurateur Lucien Olivier in the 1860s, whose original composition is said to have been far richer, though the link between that salad and the French salade russe is not firmly documented. What spread through Europe was the vegetable-and-mayonnaise version, and it is that, dressed up with smoked salmon and shrimp, that the headnote credits to the Boston Cooking-School. The insistence on four separate sections, each masked and garnished differently, belongs to a moment when salads at a formal table were expected to be built and viewed rather than mixed.